My learnings: How to talk to developers

[DavorDK]

How to communicate your product to developers? You need to build trust! This means, no features and no benefits!

You do not build trust by giving them:

1) You have these issues + my product solves them (Insert Features)

Developers, engineers and other team members get these kinds of claims all the time and they simply just don't build trust and they are so over-used that they don't spark any curiosity among tech folk.

2) "Stop losing time", "Save money", "Be the most valuable player in your team" ... (Insert Benefits)

These might spark some curiosity, but on the other hand, it might even get tech folk mad at you. This is just too vague of a message. Why would they trust you?

How then do you build trust?

Talk about PROBLEMS! You have a product that probably solves some problems, right? Well, talk about them.

Do not talk about how your super-mega-extra-cool product solves them, just make content talking about the problem. How it's usually handled, what are the pains behind it and so on.

Do it long-form, or short-form, on LinkedIn, on Twitter, in video format, podcasts and so on.

Talk about them on places developers usually hang out. Some of the obvious choices are relevant slack groups, tech Twitter, relevant subreddits, Indie hackers, and so on.

Put your company or your name behind it (although, people usually react better to a real person, rather then to a company logo). Be useful! Engage with the community.

Then, after you've built enough trust, you will be able to reap what you saw, and that means, getting all those people that trust you to try out your super-mega-extra-cool product and they'll give you an honest review.

All you need to do at this point is listen!

Don't misunderstand!

You should definitely communicate your features on places like your website, LinkedIn company page and similar.

In the business-to-developers market, this is essential for early-stage startups. When tech-folk come to your website they'll give you a very short speed date to get to know you. Communicating benefits won't tell them if they need you, features will.

[Shinmon]

While I tend to agree, I would also say that developers are a very hard group of people to sell to.

A lot of developers have a "I could build that myself" attitude and they pain has to be very high before they would buy a solution.

This is one of my learnings from the last 6 months. It's much easier to sell to the "business side".

However, building trust is the foundation of any sales process.

[DavorDK]

Not sure how would you push a Dev tool through "the business side".

Sure you can go top of funnel, still, these people are usually technical, and if they're not, they will most probably push it down the funnel so it'll end up in the Devs lap anyway.

What happens then is the Dev (most probably) will not trust it be lcause he has no reason to.

However, if the communications from that company came to him directly or indirectly through some good "problem-silving" content, then that's a different story.

Very hard to do though. Covering the top and bottom of the funnel is no easy task.

[Shinmon]

Good points and to be honest I have no idea.

Making money with dev tools is super hard from all I have experienced and seen.

The best way is probably "use locally for free to make your development easier" and then have a "use it as a team" paid tier but still pretty hard. Kind of like docker is free but hosting docker images isn't because that's what business profit from.